


Idiot

by JiM



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-06
Updated: 2011-04-06
Packaged: 2017-10-17 16:14:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/178628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JiM/pseuds/JiM
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sex is easy for Steve; it's feelings that are hard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Idiot

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kalena](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalena/gifts).



> Mild warning for reference to animal death.

Steve is good with sex. Sex is easy; it’s just a question of employing easily learned techniques in a variety of methods with a variety of partners. Each partner likes something different, but they all fall along a fairly comprehensive spectrum that Steve has mastered.  He likes the work-out of sex, the physical release and the friendliness of the act.

 

What Steve is not good with is feelings.  There aren’t any techniques for dealing with feelings.  Well, there are, but they aren’t nearly as effective as he always hopes they’ll be.  He even has an acronym for his learned techniques and the order in which he uses them: I.D.I.O.T. 

 

Step one: Ignore. Step Two: Deflect. Step Three: Ignore again (maybe you just didn’t try hard enough the first time). Step Four: Obfuscate.  Step Five: Tell the truth.  The Idiot Sequence, as he has come to call it, is inevitably followed by someone leaving, slight violence optional.

 

People always say they want the truth, they want to really know what you’re feeling, but Steve has come to know that people lie.  And even the ones who don’t lie really aren’t prepared to hear the truths that Steve carries deep inside.

 

That the love Steve feels for other people is often a muted, weakling of a feeling, always an ember and never really a flame.  That the hatred he feels is hot and bright and sharp as the noon-day sun and throws its shadows across anything else he might experience.  That his duty is an idol he has sacrificed everything to, including his body and his honor.  That he remembers every single person he has killed and they don’t trouble his sleep or his dreams at all.  That he once killed a cat that had been run over on the road and was trying to crawl away into the bushes to die and tears had run down his cheeks as he cleaned its blood from his blade because the thing had been so damned brave.

 

Lovers don’t want to hear any of those things.  If none of the other steps has worked and he has finally been driven to that final brutal truth-telling step, he can always feel his jaw set just a little forward.  When he begins to speak, his voice is always a touch deeper than usual.  If his sister had ever driven him to that stage, she would have been able to tell him that he looked exactly like his father in those moments.  But he and Mary have never tried to claw their way into one another’s lives like that. Ignoring and Deflecting have always been enough for his sister and him.

 

I.D.I.O.T., while imperfect, has generally worked well enough for Steve.  The one person it has not worked on is Danny Williams.  Which isn’t as much of a surprise as it should be, really.  For one thing, Danny had forced the sequence all out of order from Day One.  For another, when Danny actually badgered the truth from him, he hadn’t blinked.  He knew Steve’s head was a scary place and it didn’t seem to faze him in the slightest.

 

Part of it, he supposes is that Steps One and Three simply cannot work around Danny. You cannot ignore Danny Williams’ feelings.  And it’s not that he is constantly bitching and moaning; there are any number of times Steve could point to when Danny hasn’t said a word, but Steve knew exactly what his partner was feeling.  He can read Danny’s voice like Danny can read his face.

 

Steps Two and Four kinda go to shit around Danny, too.  Deflecting and Obfuscating just sharpen the Williams Will and Danny on a mission is not really worth the amount of energy it takes to fend him off.  Steve remembers his courses on resisting interrogation (torture) and how an operative is supposed to order his lies, creating cover story after cover story so they can be peeled back until an interrogator believes he has found the truth.

 

The problem with that kind of training is that they never tell you anything helpful to deal with the situation when the interrogator (Danny) starts right at the point you were hoping he would never get to; the point where there is nothing left in your head but the truth.

 

Somehow, Danny knows why Hesse and now Wo Fat are the targets of Steve’s perfect, shining hatred.  Danny has always known what everyone else has completely missed: that Steve’s love for his father wasn’t nearly the strength of his hatred for his killer.  That his memory of his mother’s love has been nearly subsumed by his hatred for his own father.  The kicker is that Danny knows all this and _doesn’t leave_.  They don’t even have good sex to bind them together. 

 

What Danny doesn’t seem to know is what he’s been doing to Steve.  Besides downgrading the Idiot Sequence from serviceable to shambles, Danny keeps encouraging all those weak, struggling feelings that have always been blasted by Steve’s hatred; affection, friendship, tenderness.  Worse still, he puts Steve’s hatred under a microscope and, not effortlessly, (at least he’s able to make the bastard work for it), dissect some of it into its component ugly parts; regret, sadness, fear.  God, so much fear in there and it burns like acid in his throat each time Danny unleashes it. 

 

How he does it is still a mystery.  Why he does it is simple; he can’t not do it.  Because, to Steve, the truth is hateful, hate-filled.  To Danny, it’s air and blood.  His hatred burns hot but flickers out quickly; his loves are the strongest things about him.

 

As the months go by, Steve has had to get better at feelings.  He is still not as good at them as he is at sex or the Idiot Sequence, but he has always learned quickly with good instruction.  Danny keeps _not leaving_ despite all the times he has triggered Step Five.  His sheer constancy has been slowly morphing Steve’s truths into other shapes, some less familiar than others. 

 

One day, Steve thinks, Danny might be the one who will find something welcome when Steve tells him the truth.


End file.
